Book Groups

The Archeology Book Group (AIA) meets once a month on a Thursday afternoon.   AIA is an independent group interested in reading about historic events, archeologically interesting facts and finds.  Book titles are determined by group members.  Copies of titles must be obtained by each member.    New members are welcome, please contact Myrna at mwsilville@gmail.com    Thank You.

Date:  November 21, 2019   1:30 - 3:30

Title: Archaeology From Space: How the Future Shapes the Past  by, Sarah Parcak

Welcome to Sarah Parcak's world. Parcak, an archaeologist and a professor of anthropology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, has mapped sites around the world from space; she does so using images captured by satellites — from NASA and from private companies — orbiting high above the ground.  From these lofty heights, sensitive instruments can reveal details that are invisible to scientists on the ground, marking the positions of walls or even entire cities that have been buried for millennia. Parcak unpacks how views from space are transforming the field of archaeology.  - LiveScience.com Mindy Weisberger 7/2019 

Date:  December 19, 2010   1:30 - 3:30

Title:  Gods Of The Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex and Gender in the Twentieth Century  by, Charles King

From an award-winning historian comes a dazzling history of the birth of cultural anthropology and the adventurous scientists who pioneered it—a sweeping chronicle of discovery and the fascinating origin story of our multicultural world.  A century ago, everyone knew that people were fated by their race, sex, and nationality to be more or less intelligent, nurturing, or warlike. But Columbia University professor Franz Boas looked at the data and decided everyone was wrong. Racial categories, he insisted, were biological fictions. Cultures did not come in neat packages labeled “primitive” or “advanced.” What counted as a family, a good meal, or even common sense was a product of history and circumstance, not of nature. In Gods of the Upper Air, a masterful narrative history of radical ideas and passionate lives, Charles King shows how these intuitions led to a fundamental reimagining of human diversity.  - Penguin/Random House Publishing

Date:  January 16, 2020   1:30 - 3:30

Title:  Underland: A Deep Time Journey  by, Robert MacFarlane  c. June 4, 2019

Hailed as "the great nature writer of this generation" (Wall Street Journal), Robert Macfarlane is the celebrated author of books about the intersections of the human and the natural realms. In Underland, he delivers his masterpiece: an epic exploration of the Earth’s underworlds as they exist in myth, literature, memory, and the land itself.  In this highly anticipated sequel to his international bestseller The Old Ways, Macfarlane takes us on an extraordinary journey into our relationship with darkness, burial, and what lies beneath the surface of both place and mind. - W.W. Norton